There are a couple of tradeoffs associated with either approach. First we look at the backslash: if you use the backslash to delimit paths, you have compatibilty problems with scripts that need to run on UNIX systems. You also need to remember to escape the backslash inside of double-quoted strings (or use single-quoted strings, because they are not interpolated). Finally, you need to remember to use a slash if you're outputting URL paths."

If you're going to be working on Win32, you may wish to pick up this book:

I am not terribly familiar with Perl in Windows (I run Linux) but I know a little about it (I used to run Windows). The \ is an escape character in Perl so you can not use it like this. Your $path would be set like this $path = 'C:\\home\\www\\blah';

You have to escape the escape so to speak Other than that I don't remember any differences in the file path.